iPhone 5 rumor rollup for the week ending Oct. 21

The fever of speculation around the Next Apple iPhone rises and ebbs like a great tide, ever restless.

That's what we assume.

iPhone 5: a cult classic because it was Steve Jobs' baby. And completely redesigned.

Here's the reason why iPhone 4S is so lame: Steve Jobs wasn't interested in it. He knew he was dying so he focused on the…iPhone 5. Which is going to be a complete redesign, and awesome and "will establish the high water mark for iPhone [sales] volumes."

That's the conclusion by Brooke Crothers, at CNET, quoting from a rumor note….sorry: a "research note" by one Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, and citing information from another source "who claims to have knowledge of the redesign."

Kumar says the Next iPhone "was the last project that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with from concept to final design." Which makes it special. So it will become a "cult classic," he says. Crothers' source says the Next iPhone "is a very large project that Steve dedicated all of his time to. He was not that involved in the 4S because his time was limited."

"So, it's probably not unreasonable to expect the iPhone 5 to be a 'complete redesign,' as the source said--meaning both externally and internally, though probably less so internally when compared with pronounced user-facing changes like the display size," Crothers concludes.

So, it's likely probably not unreasonable to not disbelieve someone who claims to know (after all why would he lie?) that the outside will be completely redesigned though the inside will be probably perhaps incompletely redesigned.

One thing we know for sure. The Next iPhone will be different from the current iPhone.

iPhone 5 will have a 4-inch screen AND Retina Display.

A Korea Times report, picked up by ITProPortal among others, assures the iOSsphere that the iPhone 5 screen will be 0.3 inches or so bigger and support Apple's pixel-dense Retina Display technology.

But it won't support OLED, according to the KT story, citing as its source an "industry executive," because of brightness and power consumption issues.

ITProPortal editor Desire Athow isn't buying that last rumor. "That's a slight contradiction given that OLED displays are known to be power sipping rather than power gulping and Apple will have to up the resolution on a 4-inch display in order to keep up with the retina display pixel density, which currently stands at 326ppi."

KT also says iPhone 5 and iPad 3 will be released in the Spring of 2012; and the Next iPhone will have a quad-core processor.